Tom Hunter - Where have all the flowers gone & The Way Home - 2012-2019

Where have all the flowers gone (2019)
Tom Hunter is known for his social documen-tary projects investigating alternative communities, contemporary music, and experimental cultures in London and across Europe. Inspired by this, Hunter takes us to the Glastonbury Festival in his book Where Have All the Flowers Gone. From its beginnings in the 1970s, this festival was driven by the ethos of the hippie movements. At the 2017 festival Hunter set up his 'naked truth photo booth' and asked festivalgoers to stand naked for portraits inside the wooden booth. In the spirit of the first Summer of Love they were asked to reimagine the liberation of that era and embrace the freedom of nudity. Hunter took their portraits with a medium-format camera in the classical tradition of nineteenth-century por-trait photographers. Accompanied by texts and images by Hunter's parents, who attended the legendary Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 and share their experiences of freedom, liberty, and counterculture in the early 1970s, Hunter's images create a contemporary vision of today's festival culture while at the same time evoking a nostalgic, historical view of that first Summer of Love.

The Way Home (2012)
The meticulously composed, painterly tableaux of Tom Hunter (*1965 in Dorset) operate on various levels: for one, he references important paintings from art history; for another, he tells us stories of our time-stories that all take place in the London borough of Hackney, where Hunter lives. What is perhaps his best-known photograph is of a young woman in a setting that alludes to Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. However, Hunter's photo portrays a Woman Reading a Possession Order-a neighbor from the squatter's scene who has just received an eviction notice. The work attracted so such attention from the media that the eviction ultimately never took place.
With his eye for the unusual and exotic in everyday life, Hunter succeeds in capturing striking, remarkable snapshots of life in Great Britain today.

bel ensemble